Rolling My Eyes

When last we met our entrepid heroes, my son and I were just arriving at the tunnel to the Black Bridge that leads over the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

We’d hoofed it pretty fast, with very few stops, to get down while the trail was still not too hot.

And then . . .

As a reminder, here’s me at the tunnel last year. I’m shod (okay, moccasined) because last year I’d gotten a late start and otherwise my feet would have fried on the sun-baked trail.

The Tunnel to the Black Bridge

So, we made it right to the mouth of that tunnel and decided to stop. There was a bit of shade to sit in and we could rest and drink up.

I took off my pack and started feeling light-headed. I sat down, and kept feeling light-headed. Then my eyes rolled up into the back of my head and I passed out.

I came to with my son pouring water on me.

I repeated the procedure a couple of minutes later.

There were plenty of folks around helping out. After a short time, a Park employee arrived. (It seems that when I passed out the first time, another of the hikers ran ahead, found the employee, and told her that “a man was having a seizure”.) The immediate suspicion was heat exhaustion.

Keep in mind that the bottom of the Grand Canyon is usually about 20° hotter than at the top, so it was probably about 95° there.

About that time another hiker showed up with similar symptons (except for the passing-out part). She was over-hot and flushed.

The remedy is to cool the person down as quickly as possible, involving pouring water on them. There can also be metabolic things happening, like not enough salt or calories.

The Park employee was Victoria, and she worked hard at cooling me until a official Park volunteer arrived with a lot more water. His name was Sjors, and had been a volunteer there for 22 years.

Anyways, after I’d been doused a bit and looking okay, we slowly moved the last half mile along the Colorado toward Bright Angel Campground. We went in stages, hopping from shady place to shady place, with them checking how I was feeling at each place. (I thought I was feeling fine, but one should not take passing out lightly.)

I should mention that to do this I put on my moccasins. As much as I would have preferred barefoot, did I want to get into an argument over it? No. Did I want to get expeditiously to my campsite? Yes. So, moccasins it was.

Here we are at a picnic table just outside the Bright Angel Campground.’

The “Rescue Squad”

You can see Sjors and Victoria (and a couple we “borrowed” the table from).

Part of what they do it take a bit of a history, and history of the day, and send that to Park medical people for a diagnosis and suggested treatment. What eventually came back was probable heat exhaustion and lack of calories. I’d had enough to drink (the recommended 500ml/hr) but my breakfast had been pretty light (because we rushed to get out of our campsite), and I hadn’t had much on the way down (one butterscotch hard candy).

So, the treatment was for me to stay cool and eat.

My son pretty much set up our camp, here.

Bright Angel Campsite

The tent is shaded, but the real technique that everybody uses is just to get into Bright Angel Creek.

Chilling in the Creek

(This picture, and subsequent pictures, was taken two days later.)

I saw people reading books with their legs in the creek. Heck, I did it myself.

You get in the creek but you also dunk your shirt in the creek and then put it on. That cools you pretty good for a while.

The next question was how much we should follow our original itinerary. Of course we want to do it, but we also don’t want me collapsing out there somewhere. So we just kept monitoring me and keeping me cool.

One thing we did do right was that our dinner was ramen (nice, salty ramen), enhanced with dried shrimp. Every ranger that saw the ramen thought it was great.

So, on we went the next day to our next campsite, the Cottonwood Campground, halfway up the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

In the end, my suspicion is that, while exacerbated by the heat, I had a low-blood sugar reaction. I’d had that butterscotch which rushed a bunch of sugar into my system. My body rushed in insulin to bring it down and overshot (I’ve had that happen before). And the low blood sugar combined with the heat is what made me pass out. After all, I was just fine when I was hiking—it was only when I stopped that I got light-headed.

Let me finish with a few more photos from the Bright Angel Campground.

Here’s the official map that shows you the layout.

Bright Angel Campground Map

And, there were any number of deer wandering around. Here’s one nibbling on a tree next to our campsite.

An Early-morning Visitor

Next entry: we head up Bright Angel Creek towards the Cottonwood Campground.

3 Responses

Wow! We did the South Rim to Phantom Ranch and back and the North to South traverse in early May (separate years in the early 1960s). Everything was in bloom. You have great pictures in your blog, but none (so far) of blossoms in Grand Canyon. It was also reasonably comfortable for the desert although we were using WW-II mummy bags on the traverse. Has global warming hit so hard that you have missed them? The traverse was when they were putting the pipeline from the springs at the foot of North Rim to the existing one at Indian Gardens, so five of the 25 miles were in a trench, on the edge of a trench, or 100 yards cross-country where everything had thorns – not the “superhighway” of today. But I am ready to do it again at 80.

Paul, thank you as ever for your contributions here. It sounds like you’ve had some amazing experiences.

Seriously, I should be able to handle 95°, and I really don’t know what went wrong (and it is particularly embarrassing since I thought I’d learned lessons from last year). Another possibility is that I just hadn’t had a chance to acclimate yet—I arrived from a cool Ohio spring.

Regarding flowers, yes, they were blooming. (Hope you caught my Jimson Weed in In (and Out) of The Box.) However, many of the flowers were ones I’d already shown from Zion, so I just got lazy when it came to taking pictures.